this city's nature is huge and overwhelming. over the winter it blankets everything and over the summer it opens up the sky to reveal blues and pinks and peach and purple. this city is bipolar. man, it's biwinning. this is where the rabbits come in.
i have a special place in my heart for rabbits. i hear rabbit stew is delicious.
don't worry. jokes.
i do honestly love rabbits. they're so plentiful and resilient. we feed one (them?) during the winter. there is a window underneath the highly raised deck. my mom plucks out the window net and sometimes leaves cabbage or old hard bread outside the window (rabbits love bread). s/he(s) (because we don't know if there's several or just the one) munches away while we watch underneath the relatively snowless ground. sometimes we leave peanuts on the fence between us and the neighbors for the local squirrels. my dad's favorite birds are sparrows so he stuck a huge four by four in the ground and we put up two birdhouses, more to come. we're frequented by sparrows year round, finches in the summer, and the occasional erratic jumping of the warbler. throughout the summer we are ever vigilant for humming birds that are attracted to my mom's virus-like plants that don't stop growing and don't die until she believes it's time. then they wilt as if by command. in the fall i will hear a coyote start howling until he's joined in with the rest of his pack. or are they foxes? or are they wolves? we watch for tornadoes in the heart of summer and measure the height of the sun based on the height of the trees around the neighborhood. on calm still days i sometimes stare up at the cerulean sky and wonder if the things i see are just eye wiggles.
there's something kind of magical about the lives that make up what you think is a quiet suburban neighborhood.
and the rabbits. well. who hasn't slowed down to let a rabbit cross the road with the eerie, perhaps even uncanny, attitude of a human pedestrian. only to find out that it's a garbage bag.
Mia,
ReplyDeleteYour blog is very entertaining! My parents sound similar to yours because they think it is their duty to single handedly feed all the birds and wildlife in the Edmonton area. I didnt even think about rabbits until I read your post. They are a huge part of nature in our city and we have come to accept them as fellow citizens. I have never really considered that before.
I attempted to make friends with a squirrel last summer, did I ever tell you? I named him Richard and fed him, until my mother -- who is not like yours -- told me that he was a pest, which was awfully depressing and what is her logic even? (And we're just going to ignore the fact that it was probably more than one.)
ReplyDeleteThe rabbits are my favourite, though. I can't not stop and watch them; I think they've got a nest (warren?) in the trees by my house, so they're always about. They're good luck charms of sorts. Without having to chop off their paws.
Also I had to repost this to say: the captcha for this comment at first was FOOFU which seems ENTIRELY appropriate.
Nature meets suburbia!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to hear that your family feeds the animals properly. When I was going to school in trois-rivieres and living in the university residence, we had marmottes (groundhogs) EVERYWHERE and people took to feeding them whatever they had, which usually meant that if it wasn't lettuce, spinach, or something grass-like, it sat there until it was trampled down into the dirt.
Just last night, I was driving home from my concert and a rabbit darted into the road... I winced as I eased on the brake pedal. My boyfriend laughed at me and said that it was just a rabbit. =/ I didn't want to hit the poor thing, he was so scared! Luckily he stopped at the median and turned around and made it back to the side he came from.
ReplyDeleteOn a slightly more relevant note... Do you think that the nature you've described is "urban nature", or would you consider it to be the nature that urban places fights/dominates? Are they one and the same to you?
I ask you this because I kept thinking about the concept of "urban nature" and trying to decide for myself if the term is distinct from more classic views of nature (wildlife, greenery, etc). We have a fair bit of "wildness" to our city, especially with the river valley, but a lot of the times city spaces will utterly destroy anything "natural", leaving vast areas devoid of nature in the literal sense. Is there something to be said about the nature of cities on their own? Can cities be viewed as a part of nature themselves because we, too, are animals and have created them?